Into the Dust

As you are driving to home from school, you notice that the sky is looking rather peculiar. A fleeting hope passes at the thought of rain in this drought riddled area. However, you soon realize that this is not rain, but rather another dust storm coming in. You must drive faster because once the dust clouds hit, your entire vehicle will be encased in dirt and your vision will be blinded. Soon, the only thing visible will be the tops of telephone poles. You hurry home to hide in the cellar with the rest of your family. Your mother has put a wet rag over your younger siblings’ faces to keep them from inhaling dust. You and your family can hear the dust pour down on the roof, and you briefly wonder if this will be the day when the roof caves in. You wait for the storm to cease and then you help your family out of the cellar. You look around and find the floor layered with three feet of dust. All of the beds are coated in a blanket of dirt. Your family’s meager food supply is completely ruined from the wind blowing open cupboard doors. You look around and see that dust is coating every square inch of your house.

Luckily, this is not your life and it never will be. The Dust Bowl was a horrific time in American history. Not only because it displaced thousands from their homes, but because it also made a horrible time in America even worse. When the Dust Bowl began, America was already going through the Great Depression, which caused millions to become unemployed and displaced from their homes. Many people in the Dust Bowl states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma abandoned their farms and moved to California to work on migrant farms with the hope of making enough money to support their families. Often small children had to help work in the fields to make ends meet.

Studying rural areas and the Dust Bowl is only one of my goals for my ELI on the Great Depression. My other two goals focus on life in urban areas and the social aspects of the Great Depression. It is quite difficult to start such an independent type of class without any prior experience with this type of learning, and it took me awhile to get used to setting my own learning goals. Once I got the hang of my freedom, I found that it was hard to identify my goals because I was waiting for them to come to me. By that I mean I was doing a lot of research and I was looking for common themes in my research that would come together into a goal. In time, and with the help of my mentor, that was exactly what happened and now the research process has become easier because I am now more focused as I look for resources and information.

So far the ELI experience has been an exciting and useful journey. I truly believe that taking an ELI has taught me very handy life skills that I will use for the rest of my life. Already this semester I have learned to become more independent because of the freedom I have been given with taking an ELI, and I have also improved my public speaking skills. I am extremely awful at public speaking, to the point where it becomes painful for me and my audience, and speaking in front of people who are kind and free of judgement has helped me a lot to not be so nervous in front of people. All of these skills that I am learning will help me a lot when I am away at college, and partaking of independent classes, similar to those of an ELI.

~Abi